The Guns of August

I am reading Barbara Tuchman's book on WWI. It describes the details of the calculations of the French and the German armies. The armies marched (imagine walking from Aachen to Paris with a bayonet in hand) and roads and marching days had to be calculated with precision while there was no wire communication among the units. Generals strategized without precise information and they were under tremendous stress and used to blank out. All those flanking maneuvers suddenly brought up the memory of my readings in the Circulo Militar of Buenos Aires. I was 14 and searching Buenos Aires public libraries for information about the rocket technology for the project we were doing with a Dutch school friend, he was fabricating the explosive fuel and I was trying to design and procure pipes. The Military Club was sited in an impressive palace in the most elegant neighborhood, surrounded by elaborate iron work gates. Inside there were large brown leather lounge chairs and sezlongs, with quiet old people reading the papers.

I took out the Military Science journals and read the articles. Remember one about artillery and rockets, with simple equations to calculate range. There were articles about the Triple Alianza (Paraguay) war, that struck me as uninteresting. Horsemanship and river crossing. I soon dropped out of the rocket project, the others were obsessed in building wood and iron pipe pistols, which they did.